e-learning

Theme: Distance Education: Pedagogical Challenges

My major investigation in my master’s thesis was based on a class held at theUniversity of Siegen in 2007: “Digital Literature and Arts II.” In this course Iserved as academic assistant and developed a teaching model that is nowapplicable in Blended Learning Environments. While in my bachelor thesis I wasinterested in the design of online learning environments, my main focus in thecompletion of the master’s was on the student’s course performance: Myobjective was to find methods to analyze the students learning activity. Therefore,I analyzed the teaching and learning interaction based on theories I derived fromstudies on Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) and ComputerSupported Collaborative Learning (CSCL).

The introduction of digital technologies into the learning processes has meant the creation of new educational spaces that, when they take place on the Internet and are founded in non-presence and asynchrony, are known as “Virtual Learning Environ- ments” (VLE). VLE constitute new pedagogic realities that must answer to the users’ needs, their educational purposes, the curricula with which they work and, specifically, the formative needs for the people that integrate them. But the key to define “virtual” in terms of human experience and not in terms of technological hardware is the concept of “presence,” which is crucial in our pedagogical model and our way of being comparative literature lecturers in a virtual university. Technologies are tools capable of building a learning frame, although it is necessary to endow them with contents and humanity. Different voices have warned of the sterility of a technological environment that does not have any pedagogic or didactic specificity (different from the traditional models). After all, learning is learning whether it has an ex- tra “e” or not, and so VLE are only as good or as bad as the ways they are used. Thus, the revolutionary point of their use would not be the technological aspect whether they really offer new ways of teaching. We will show the example of a completely virtual university, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), where the learning process takes place in a virtual campus, and we will focus on a specific subject: Universal Literary Topics.

Source: author's abstract

This dissertation analyzes eLiterature in a multidisciplinary way, considering both the strictly literary aspect and correlated aspects such as the technological and educational ones.